A Good Reason for Headlines

A study from the Poynter Institute had some interesting observations when they studied what people look on web pages while wearing eyetracking equipment.

The project, Eyetrack III, may or may not have implications for your web site.

One quote I thought was very interesting:

Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning. In general, our testing found that people spent more time focused on small type than large type. Larger type resulted in more scanning of the page -- fewer words overall were fixated on -- as people looked around for words or phrases that captured their attention

My favorite page in the study was one that compared the styles of five different web sites.

So you Want to Volunteer With a NonProfit

There are a lot of reasons to get involved with a nonprofit organization.

One reason may be because you have some free time, and want to find a way to spend it in a productive manner. There are many organizations that could use a hand, and many opportunities looking for people to fill them. A group like Volunteer Match can help you find an internship, or post as an educator, mentor, or other position.

The range of choices may surprise you. A search in my area revealed a need for a person to help with Special Olympics, a music/choral group leader, a court appointed special advocate, a database application developer for a museum, a museum guide, a humane cat trapper, a dog walker, a literacy volunteer teaching adults, a park ranger intern, a member of a historic sewing group, and many more.

Another reason may be because you have nothing else to do. I remember when a friend had left his job, and was wandering directionless. I saw a sign for a group that was rescuing and rehabilitating wild birds nearby, and convinced him that it might be something fun to do, and that I would join with him. He got involved with them, and spent some serious time helping to do construction jobs around their facilities, care for sick and injured birds, and travel to places near and far to help rescue birds from oil spills. He met his future wife while volunteering there. It seemed in some ways that the opportunity helped rescue him.

A different reason might be that you have no choice. Well, you do have a choice, but helping others may just be the thing that helps you. An ex-neighbor knocked on my door a couple of months back. He asked me for some advice with the legal system. He had been caught driving without a license -- for the third time. His court date was in about a month. It's a charge that often carries with it some prison time. He asked me what he should do. I told him that the best thing he could do was to go to some place like the Boys club, or somewhere else, and volunteer. Find something that a judge could look at and say to him or herself that "here is someone who is trying to do something for someone else. Someone who just might have seen the errors of his ways." I didn't want to get all preachy, and I could tell by the incredulous look on his face that it wasn't the advice that he expected.

I don't know if he took my advice. I hope that he did.

If you do consider volunteering, there are some things that you should keep in mind. I came across an excellent online resource that's worth a good look if you're inclined to get involved. The Volunteer Legal Handbook - 7th Edition looks at some of the possible problems and risks you might take as a volunteer. Here are a couple of examples that they describe :

• The auto accident. You volunteer to drive a group of little league baseball players to a baseball game. You are involved in an auto accident and some of your little league passengers are hurt. Are you liable for their injuries? If so, will your insurance cover the claim?



• The fired volunteer. You are an unpaid supervisor of a group of volunteers. One of the volunteers has failed to perform adequately, and you have terminated his volunteer status with the organization. Now the former volunteer has sued you and the organization for slander, libel and wrongful dismissal. Are you liable?

I'm going to take another look at that Volunteer Match site. There are a couple of really nice museums nearby that looked like they needed guides. It could be fun.

short bits

Some links that I read on the web recently which I found interesting:

• It's Not Just Usability
• Why I don't recommend Firefox
• Microsoft Patents Tabbing through a web page
• Windows for Warships
• Creativity Techniques
• The Age of the Essay
• HTML Overlays
• Can social tagging overcome barriers to content classification?
• Making Stone Soup
• Information Architecture Research

blogging businesses

Why should your business have a blog?

I was hard pressed to come up with any better reasons than the ones listed in Lip-Sticking: 5 Reasons Jane Thinks Every Small Business Should Blog. If you have a business, and you don't have a blog, I'd recommend that you pay her site a visit.

As Yvonne Divita states, it's about improving communication with your customers. A blog can be very easy to set up, and if you like writing, can be a great way to get online quickly and easily.

I'll add to her other points that it can be fairly inexpensive to set up a blog.

Learn While You Surf

I'm often amazed at how much I learn while I'm online.

An article in today's local paper noted that the City of Philadelphia is considering taking on the costs of setting up the whole City for wireless connections to the web, at low or no cost for residents and visitors to the city.

One of the justifications for the move is that it would be much cheaper to do that than it would be to build a small library, and many more people would benefit from the access.

I think it's a great idea.

But how beneficial is web access? How much of a difference will it make to peoples' lives if they can just surf the web where ever they will? When ever they want?

A post over at DonnaM's blog looks at going online and 'Wasting' time looking for information. I've come to the same conclusion as Donna.

When I go online looking for the answer to a specific question, I don't always find the answer. But most of the time, I do learn something useful.

Apologies to Google and Blogger

I owe Google and Blogger an apology.

Last week, I applied to participate in Google's AdSense, after reading an article on the Blogger webpage titled There's an AdSense in my Blog.

To my surprise, I was turned down. I didn't expect that after reading Biz Stone's AdSense article. I sent Biz Stone an email, and I sent another to the AdSense team expressing my confusion and my dissatisfaction. I even made a blog post here: Google Hate Me

A DNS propagation problem kept me from getting emails at the beginning of this week, and I went through 72 hours or so without any emails. (Serious withdrawal there!) As I was sorting through my accumulated mails yesterday afternoon, there were a couple from the AdSense team.

One of them was a note informing me that I had submitted the wrong URL (".net" instead of ".com") and that they visited my blog, and figured out what had happened. The other was an email accepting me into the AdSense program.

It's my fault. I wish they had included the URL I submitted when they sent me the rejection. But regardless, I should have given them the right address.

It does appear that someone other that Google and Blogger own blogspot.net, and it's for sale. It does have a redirect going on to another site. I can understand why they would have sent a rejection notice.

Thanks AdSense team, for following up.

Inline Ads at Forbes

Since I've been paying a fair amount of attention lately to advertisements on web sites, a Whitespace article discussing Forbes' use of Ad Links In Content sort of stood out for me.

A good question, too. Should this type of ad be linked to differently than other ads in an online article.

I hope that this practice is abandoned. And quickly.

Two-Year Anniversary of Cre8asite Forums

It gives me a lot of pleasure to announce that we are celebrating the second anniversary of Cre8asite Forums. See: Cre8asiteForums Breaks Out the Champagne for its Two-Year Anniversary

Seeing Cliches

Fun site, well worth a visit, A Primer of Visual Cliche shows images that we see in many places, and how they are used over and over. And they are accompanied by some pretty insightful language:

Advertisers seemed to think we gape with astonishment, collapse with hysterical laughter when faced with twins - be it shampoo or spark plugs.

Harvesting Solar Hydrogen

Good news on the scientific front from the land down under.

Research at The University of New South Wales is underway to bring us a breakthrough in energy that is amazing. Will we see Solar hydrogen being the way people start supplying their energy needs within the next seven years?

Using special titanium oxide ceramics that harvest sunlight and split water to produce hydrogen fuel, the researchers say it will then be a simple engineering exercise to make an energy-harvesting device with no moving parts and emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants.

This is a technology to keep an eye upon. What does it mean to the giant energy producing companies, to the Middle East with their reserves of fuel? What political and economic forces will be ignited if this energy system starts being implemented?

Sell Side Advertising, Part II

Seems like this is an idea that's going quickly around the web. Joi Ito wants to b e in the middle of the creation of a Sell side advertising system.

The thought of a pool of ads, that bloggers could choose and use, is the next step beyond an ad sense system.

What would it take to set a system like this up? I suspect that some affiliate tracking software could be tweaked to do quite nicely.

Trackback in Your Blogger Blog?

There was a great suggestion by a member of the Cre8asite Forums that I'd like to share.

One of the things I've wished for in my Blogger-based blog was a track-back like the folks at Movable Type blogs have.

I never noticed the wish/suggestions part of the feedback form that Blogger titles Blogger: Talk To Us.

If you use blogger, and you're wishing you had trackback, it's more likely to happen if you ask for it from the people who can give it to you - Blogger.

Pick Your Own Ads

Imagine that you decided to try to make some money on your web site by running some ads.

So, you go to a page where ads are available to be chosen, and used, and you pick out three or four that are appropriate to your site.

You check to make sure that your site is appropriate for the uses envisioned by the advertiser, and if it is, you cut and paste the code for those ads into a text editing program, and then into the template for your blog, or the html for your static web site.

The ad runs until the owner's cash reserve is emptied - then the ad disappears.

This is more work than something offered by some text-ad programs, but owners of sites get to choose the ads that run on their sites. There's a lot of value to that.

Will we ever see this model of advertising? I hope so. It's described in more detail on John Battelle's Searchblog: Sell Side Advertising: A New Model?

There's a lot of value to being able to choose your business partners. It's always possible to find them on your own, but not really easy. Unfortunately, most systems for showing ads are accompanied by adhesion contracts where the large company supplying the ads have all the power, and all of the say, and the people displaying the ads have no ability to negotiate.

I've had troubles with automated, contextual ads from one of the large online booksellers showing products from competitors. (Fortunately, you could choose which books to display from them rather than just use the contextual system.) I'd once signed up with a large reseller of hosting and domain services to act as an affiliate, only to get so disgusted by their practices that I yanked all links to them, and never contacted them ever again.

It would be great if someone set up an advertising clearinghouse where people could select the ads they wanted to show quickly and easily.

Google Hate Me

[There's an update to this post titled: Apologies to Google and Blogger It was an error on my part that caused this misunderstanding between the Google AdSense team and me.]

Excited is what I was, by the Biz Stone article There's AdSense in My Blog.

Actually, there was Adsense in my blog since the day Google bought Blogger, and put it in the header at the top of my blog. I have been AdSense free ever since last week, when those ads were replaced with a Blogger Nav Bar.

And then there was this Biz Stone article.

I've sent an email to Biz asking him to remove his article on ad sense from the Blogger Knowledge base. Biz does work for the company that claimed in its IPO filing with the SEC that they follow the credo "Do No Evil." Still I don't know if they would be happy if he removed the article. I wouldn't want him to take the food off the table of his children for doing the right thing. But I suspect that I'm not the only one being treated badly by Google.

I guess that Google hates this site. Or they do now. I don't blame them. It's typical of a lot of blogs. I suspect it doesn't get as many visits as Biz Stone, Genius which displays AdSense ads, even though he says at the bottom of the blog, "The thoughts and ideas expressed here are mine and mine alone. Not those of my employer."

And frankly, Biz has a lot more "my cat's breath smells like catfood" posts than I do.

Mark Pilgrim's wonderful blog, Dive into Mark explains the difference between a corporate blog and a personal blog, telling us:

So, I have a corporate blog now, in addition to "dive into mark," which will remain a personal blog. A corporate blog is like a personal blog, except you don't get to use the word "motherfucker."

I never use those types of words here. It's not because this is a personal blog, or a corporate blog, but rather because I think that type of language is a tired cliche.

As excited as I was to read Biz Stone's article, I was even more excited when I received the response from Google fairly quickly after I followed the link in Mr. Stone's article to Google's sign-on for adsense. After reading what I now take for fiction in the Biz Stone article, I figured that my adsense ads would return, but this time I would get paid for click-throughs on them.

I imagine that I haven't made much money for Google over the last year or so. But, I had these visions of writing long, beautiful essays here to attract large audiences, and massive amounts of clickthroughs - you know, like the daydreams you have when you pretend you've won the $100 million jackpot in the lottery.

While that seems like a silly pipe dream, I suspect that between blog posts and forum posts, I've probably written around 500,000 words on the web over the past couple of years.

But my site is a personal site. And I use blogger software to publish it - blogger. Oddly, that seems to be one of the reasons why my site was denied. I'm not sure. I don't quite understand this reason:

Client-side software use: A site or third party cannot display our ads as a result of the actions of any software application such as a toolbar. We may not accept sites that are associated with some types of client-side software or offer these types of client-side software.

The other reason was insulting, and infuriating:

Page type: Your website is a type of website that we do not currently accept into our program. Such websites include, but are not limited to, chat sites, personal pages, search engines, sites that contain predominately copyrighted material, and sites that drive traffic through cybersquatting.

I'm not sure if I'm being accused of having a personal site, but it's less personal that that of Biz Stone, Genius. It's not a chat site, or a search engine.

I'm not a cybersquatter. At least not intentionally. For one thing, the domain is "blogspot" which belongs to Google, so if anyone is cybersquatting here, under the ICANN definition, it would be the holder of the domain name.

But, I'll look at the subdomain, too. There were some trademarks with the word "nasty" in them at the US Patent and Trademark Office, such as these:

• NASTY BEAST
• TERRIBLE NASTY SCARIES
• MCNASTY TIKI PARTY
• NASTY GIRL
• NASTY SANTA
• TOO CUTE TO BE NASTY
• THE BIG NASTY
• THE NASTY POETS
• NASTY BOYS & THE WILD THANGS

Actually, there were 131 trademarks listed which included the word "nasty." I can only imagine what services or goods some of them protected. Not a single one of those is "nastybit" or "a Nasty bit of business". Now I know that I would likely have to look at state trademark databases and common law trademarks and first use in commerce, if anyone is even using those phrases in commerce. But, to the best of my knowledge, I have a good faith belief that there is no one I am depriving of their livelihood nor harming anyone's good will by using this domain name.

So, it's either that I have a "personal" site, or the site contains "predominately copyrighted material." I confess. This site contains predominately copyrighted material.

As soon as I write it, and publish it, it is copyrighted. All of it.

If I use a quote here, I try to limit my use of other's materials to fair use. I suspect that Google means someone else's copyrighted material. So, I'm either being accused of being a thief or writing a personal site.

I'm ready to use the types of words Mark Pilgrim mentioned above after being told that.

Funny that there was no problem last week displaying Ad Sense ads on these pages.

I asked for an apology after being told this. It's never a good customer service approach to accuse your customers of theft or cybersquatting or writing personal web pages.

I was told that I would be violating the terms of use of the Google Ad Sense program if I repeated any of the correspondence between Google and myself in public.

What I remember of my first year of law school contracts class is that there needs to be offer and acceptance to have a valid contract. There is no acceptance, so there is no contract.

I also picked through the boilerplate on the adsense contract page they pointed to, and tried to find out where it said that I couldn't talk about a conversation that I was a party to. I did not agree to that contract.

I never agreed to the Adsense ads on the blog when Google took over.

Granted, Google has a right to choose whichever sites they want to when they want to advertise. Honestly, I would have been happy with a "your site doesn't do enough traffic" or something similar. But, to call me a content thief, or a cybersquatter, and to make legal threats in my direction doesn't fit the method of operation of a company that swears to "do no evil."

If this site disappears, I may have to find some new blogging software, and a new place to blog.

I liked google, and I liked blogger.

What does it take to be a team?

An article on Darwin magazine brushes the surface of how to build a team, and how to help a team that has experienced problems. Help for Team Efforts is a good first look at teamwork, and telltale signs of when things are going right, and when they are going wrong.

One thing I've noticed about building a team is that it's something you have to work upon regularly. If you give your team tasks to perform on a regular basis, they start to develop a sense of how to work together. And a good team can accomplish a lot more than the combination of the efforts of individuals.

New Navbar

Courtesy of Douglas Bowman, it seems that us Blogspot hosted bloggers have a new navigation bar instead of ads at the top of our pages.

I like the last few changes made by Google's bloggger - the navbar, the profile, the newest templates, the newer writing interface.

I've been thinking about consolidating some of my blogging efforts because I've spread myself pretty thin. I don't know if I will.

But the tools that blogger has been adding make it harder to let this one go. Maybe I'll try to breathe some life into it again, and see if I can get it going.

Sliding in on an IceRocket

I don't know if there's really anything that new to the Mark Cuban backed search engine IceRocket, but it's kind of interesting hearing his take on it and reading through the many comments that it generated.

It's good to see people trying to wrest Google's crown from its brow, regardless of how much I like Google.

I Don't Recall the Words...

A great argument for learning by rote: In Defense of Memorization

I'll confess that it's been a while since I tried to learn all the lyrics to a song, or to memorize a poem, or the lines of a play, or much of anything.

I'm going to try to memorize a couple of poems, and see if there's anything of worth to it other than the ability to spout the lines out whenever I want. I suspect that there is.

Brand (new) Experiences

Inspired by Dirk Knemeyer's article at Digital Web Magazine - Brand Experience and the Web, I started a thread on the topic of how one could use interactivity online to help build a brand.

I titled the thread How Much Would You Pay for a Cup of Coffee. I got some great answers, including one dealing with the difference between building a branding, and postioning oneself within a niche. There were also some nice links to online applications that help to provide interesting and useful ways to experience different products online in a way that is helpful to a potential customer.

I've been thinking about some responses to the thread. I'm torn between discussing the topic here, and posting responses there. If I write some words over at the forum, I stand a better chance of getting some great responses. If I post over here, I add some volume and mass and content to this often neglected blog.

It's a tough choice, and the blog often loses out to the forum. I really need to dedicate a little more effort in building a brand over here.

In case this post does spawn some discussion, I'll throw out the following question: What are some of the ways that you've seen people attempt to build brand through online activities?

Did You See Seashells at the Seashore?

My friend and usabilty consultant extraordinaire, Kim Krause, spent a week at the beach disconnected from the world (wide web, that is).

She writes about it in There Were No Search Engines At The Seashore. I think I have to give that a shot, and see how it goes.